THE COLLECTION
Laurence Olivier... Harry
Helen Mirren... Stella
Alan Bates... James
Malcolm McDowell... Bill
Director: Michael Apted
Writer: Harold Pinter (adapted his play for television)
Produced by Derek Granger and Laurence Olivier
Costume Design by Beatrice Dawson
interviewer: Why do you think the conversations in your plays are so effective?
Pinter: I don't know, I think possibly it's because people fall back on anything they can lay their hands on verbally to keep away from the danger of knowing, and of being known.
--from a 1967 interview with Lawrence M. Bensky
Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976 TV) part 1 of 6
I am very conscious of rhythm. It's got to happen "Snap. Snap"--just like that or it's wrong. I'm also interested in pitch....I remember when we did "The Collection" on Off-Broadway a few years ago, there was an American actor who was in big trouble with his part. I told him instead of trying to find reasons for his characterization, "Why don't you read the part and pay attention to the stress of the words." He did it, and he was fine. The point is the stresses tell you what the meaning is. Saying it up or down can change the whole meaning. It has to be just right.
--Pinter, as told to John Lahr in 1967
Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976 TV) part 2 of 6
Arthur Ganz on Pinter:
Pinter's plays require of thier audiences a sensitivity to these shifts in aesthetic key--some slight, some abrupt and daring--and especially to those moments of symbolic expansion when the characters lunge forward, thrusting their significance at the beholder. The feeling of dislocation that the audience experiences as the plays move back and forth between the realistic psychological mode and the symbolic one accounts, in considerable part, for the sense of menace that pervades Pinter's world. But it is the threat of meaning rather than the threat of violence that lies at the root of Pinter's menace.
Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976 TV) part 3 of 6
interviewer: Do you think your plays will be performed fifty years from now? Is universality a quality you consciously strive for?
Pinter: I have no idea whether my plays will be performed in fifty years, and it's of no moment to me. I'm pleased when what I write makes
sense in South America or Yugoslavia--it's gratifying. But I certainly don't strive for universality--I've got enough to strive for just writing
a bloody play!
--from a 1967 interview with Lawrence M. Bensky
Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976 TV) part 4 of 6
"But what do you say your plays are 'about', Mr Pinter?"
"The weasel under the cocktail cabinet."
Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976 TV) part 5 of 6
John Russell Taylor on "The Collection" and "The Lover":
No longer is there any question of 'failure' of communication; in both plays the characters are educated and articulate, they are capable of expressing to each other whatever they want to express. If they want to tell the truth about themselves they have at their disposal the means of doing so, but of course they don't want to, and it remains highly doubtful whether even if they did they could. What each wants to know about the other, and what we want to know about them, is essentially unknowable, perhaps does not even exist--it is the one face behind the faces....when Stella's husband James sets out to meet and question Bill he does not seem to be looking for the truth about that. She has told him it happened, and apparently he believes her. No, the truth he wants to find is the truth about her; he will know more about her if he get to know the man she has found attractive enough to go to bed with at first meeting. He doesn't, of course: the more contradictory accounts emerge, the more
lies, equivocaton,and halftruths pile up, the less anyone knows about anyone. The defense mechanisms of human beings are too well-ordered for them to do anything else but go smoothly into action at the mere hint from an outsider that given half a chance he will find out the whole truth, pin one down, and categorize one forever.
Harold Pinter's The Collection (1976 TV) part 6 of 6
